Historic Headlines

On May 16, 1977, a rotor blade broke off a helicopter on the roof of Manhattan’s Pan Am Building after the copter’s landing gear failed, causing it to turn sideways. The blade killed five people.

The New York Times reported: “Whirling like a giant boomerang, the blade struck four people on the roof-top madding pad, killing three instantly, then plunged over the skyscraper’s west parapet. About halfway down the gray tower, the blade crashed into a window and broke in two. One piece of the blade continued to fall, whirling onto Madison Avenue and killing a woman.”

The roof of the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), an 808-foot-tall building situated between Grand Central Terminal and the New York Central Building (Helmsley Building), was used as a helipad from 1965 to 1968, transporting passengers from Midtown to the Pan Am terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport. The helipad was reopened in February 1977, just three months before the accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the accident was caused by “metal fatigue,” which caused the landing gear to fail. The Pan Am helipad was shut down following the accident and has not reopened.

Connect to Today:

An October 2011 Times article noted that 100 helicopters regularly fly over New York City, whisking corporate executives, shuttling sightseeing tourists, and carrying passengers to airports, which made for an estimated 80,000 takeoffs in 2010. All three New York City heliports are situated along rivers, rather than on building roofs like the former Pan Am helipad.

The article added: “Helicopters have long had a cranky relationship with some of the city’s populace and politicians, who deplore their noise, emissions and what seems to be an unsettling tendency to end up in the water. And indeed, a group of politicians on Wednesday called for a ban on the flying of tourist helicopters in Manhattan, even as helicopter operators maintained that it is far more dangerous to drive in New York.”

Though there may be fewer safety risks these days, in your opinion should nonessential and tourist helicopters be allowed to fly over New York City, or any other large city? What about tourist sites, like the Grand Canyon? Why or why not? What transportation alternatives do you think we should consider as we look to decrease air and noise pollution in the future?

They were originally going to film the helicopter scene in “Superman The Movie” (1978) using this building until this incident happened. Too bad there wasn’t a real Superman to save those people that day.

To answer your question with my opinion: the extreme majority of tourist helicopters that fly up and down gawking at the Manhattan skyline do so above the Hudson River. They *appear* to pose minimal safety threat to people in the skyscraper canyons of the island itself. The executive helicopters that whisk the Billionaires off to the Hamptons or their estates in Connecticut and upstate New York (or “just” the Millionaires to the airports) take less predictable routes, but represent a much smaller fraction of the total volume of helicopter flights. So overall, besides some localized noise at the specific 3 Heliports (I believe Manhattan has only 3 left), I’m not sure why anyone would bother banning these transportation services?

My boss and I used to take the NY Airways helicopter from and to JFK back in those days, and on May 16, 1977, we were in a taxi heading to the Pan Am building to catch the helicopter, but we were delayed in traffic and we were going to take the helicopter that crashed back to JFK. We were still in the cab when we saw the accident. We were sure lucky we were late when that tragic event happened.